The tallow dip now flared. Goody shielded it cautiously as it sputtered and then she arose to her feet. Between her fingers the light spread, throwing great, grotesque shadows of her hand on the walls, in one direction and a larger adumbration of her head in the other. Garde saw the couch, which she had known was in the corner. She also saw a white face, too thin to be pretty, and all of a soul’s being and anguish concentrated in two great eyes. Her own eyes were blazing with the emotions by which she was possessed. As if there had been some great affinity between them, the young woman on the couch was looking at Garde the moment the dip illumined the room.
“Who’s that?” said the startled Hester on the couch.
“A friend, a friend, dear,” said Goody. “I brought her to see you. She knows Edward.”
“She—she knows Ned?” said the wasted young mother, raising herself up, abruptly. “Let me see her. Oh, oh,—you are so pretty! But you won’t take him away from me—you won’t take him, please? He does really love me—he didn’t mean what he said. He must love me, now. He hasn’t seen our little baby, or he would love me more than anything in the world. You wouldn’t take him away from me—now?”
As Hester sat there, propped up by one thin, white arm, brushing her hair from her face and leaning eagerly toward her visitor, Garde could only put her hand to her cheek and shake her head. Her bosom rose and fell in the agitation which was shaking her whole being.
“Oh, I am so glad—oh, I knew you wouldn’t,” said the girl on the couch. “You couldn’t have the heart, could you? See—see!”
Weakened as she was, she made a great effort to rally her strength and dragged a little bundle forth from between the blankets and her own throbbing bosom, where she had kept it partially warm. She was stifling sobs all the time she was speaking. Her nerveless fingers sought in the folds with instinctive tenderness, to uncover a tiny face, as immobile as marble. “It’s our little child,” said the mother. “She looks so like him. He would have to love me now—you see he couldn’t help it.”
Goody took the babe in her arms. Garde saw everything. She saw the tidy poverty of the hut. She saw the ghost of the girlish beauty, which this abandoned mother had once possessed. She saw the young creature tuck in, next her bosom, ecstatically, a worn-out stocking—a man’s stocking.
Garde wanted to flee, but Goody brought her the babe—a little doll indeed. Goody took her hand, for Garde seemed stricken with helplessness, and placed it lightly on the tiny, white face of the child. The girl drew it away with a shudder. The babe was dead.
“Go home, dearie,” said Goody, in a croon. “You will know what to do. God makes few of the marriages laid at His door, but He does make some of these. Hester has a right to believe He made her a wife—else why a mother?”